Meeting for their annual conference, the members of the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) convened this year in Savannah, Georgia from Nov. 12-16, to share their latest projects, discoveries, restorations, and technical advancements. In addition, this year they came to talk about the future. Throughout several pre-planned sessions on the future affecting the archivist community, members listened to speakers and share their concerns about the open questions that puzzle not just members of their own profession but also the large world of moving image creation, distribution, and preservation. Much of the substance focused on the perplexing topic of convergence.

The first session of the conference, titled "Future Directions New Horizons: Organizations in the Face of Convergence" featured several speakers exploring the general theme. Ricky Erway, senior program officer at OCLC Research and a past coordinator of the Library of Congress' American Memory collection, spoke about models for working together. With many organizations exploring partnerships, Erway articulated the progressive stages necessary for success -  contact, cooperation, coordination, collaboration, and finally, convergence. In order to create something new, she said, "Trust must deepen among parties in the collaboration stage." Eventually, the entities will achieve transformational change, like a trapeze artist learning to let go until one reaches a new trapeze.

I think anyone who has worked to forge synergy between complex organizations or even between two strong-willed people will recognize these successive stages of contact, cooperation, coordination, collaboration, and convergence. For the relationships to work, the entities need to become familiar with and trust one another before they begin to collaborate on projects. Building these relationships and procedural issues can become hard work, and so, it's not surprising that it's easy to give up the quest before the new creative phase of convergence takes off the ground.

Another speaker, Sam Brylawski, the Editor of UCSB's online Encyclopedic Discography of Victor Recordings and past head of the LOC's Recorded Sound Section, opened his remarks by asserting the direction toward convergence is analogous to Breezewood, a well-known tourist trap off the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Taking advantage of a gap in the federal highway system, Breezewood forces travelers to navigate an overbuilt strip of traffic lights, franchise food outlets, and gas stations. With a myriad of different recording standards and a lack of clarity about even the immediate future of formats - HD, Blue Ray, DVDs, etc, it's hard to see past the trap for the on ramp to the new digital highway. The choices are critical. Brylawski asserted, "How we preserve and reformat influences what we preserve."

Finally, Richard Cox, Professor in Library and Information Science at the University of Pittsburgh, provided a concise overview of the challenges facing archivists who grew up in a digital world and found themselves "blinded by lights of the digital age." In the future, archivists will increasingly work with digitally-born material, one that includes a more democratic culture of citizen archivists, and will need to adapt to the continuing evolution of the web. Those who preserve our audio-visual heritage will face the ultimate question - can everything be saved? Important in answering the question is the formulation of new appraisal approaches to digital and web material. Cox characterized the future challenges of the archivist profession as "more complex than we could imagine."

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